Digital image data production has become increasingly utilized with the advancement of digital image data capture devices, the prevalence of image intensive home pages and websites on the World Wide Web, and improvements in digital image output devices, including band printers. Image production via band printing sometimes encounters difficulties when print orientations differ from captured orientations, e.g., landscape images printed in portrait layouts. FIG. 1 illustrates an example of a single page portrait layout of four images, where three of the images 10, 12, and 14 are landscape images, and one image 16 is a portrait image 16. A band printer, for example, an inkjet printer, normally prints in a predetermined direction, e.g., left to right, across a page from top to bottom. Thus, when band printing images 10, 12, 14, and 16, images 10 and 12 would be printed first as the page is printed from top to bottom. However, in order to print these images, the stored image data for these images requires rotation, since the order of the data in storage for the landscape image does not match the order necessary for printing in a portrait orientation.
Rotating received image data to form a printing band is often a slow and repetitive process. Typical band printing of rotated image data includes decompressing the entire image to then select the portion of the decompressed image data that is appropriate for the current printing band. While all systems must have enough memory to hold a single print band of image data, most systems do not include enough memory to store decompressed and rotated image data from an entire image during band printing. Thus, for each printing band, the entire image must be redecompressed in order to obtain the appropriate data for the current printing band.
One method to achieve more efficient printing of rotated images is to provide a print buffer large enough to hold an entire image's worth of decompressed and rotated image data. Unfortunately, in order to provide enough memory to accommodate any potential image size is impractical and cost-prohibitive for most systems.
What is needed is a method and system of increasing print performance of rotated images with efficient use of memory. The present invention addresses such a need.